Identity Coaching: The Most Delicate of Journeys.
This video explains some principles about identity coaching which I use to introduce my course next month. One of the key ideas I will be covering in this course will be a process called Rescripting.
I often felt that I wanted to be both a happy and successful person, but somehow my outward success came with a deep sense of anxiety. NLP helped me explore and heal much of this, but somehow, I still felt at some deep level that ‘I am an anxious person.’
I was rereading a book on Transactional Analysis in 2002, when I spontaneously experienced a profound healing with different imagery. When I founded NLP School the following year, I created the process of Rescripting based on that experience.
Since then I have had literally thousands of participants at my workshops saying that Rescripting has positively changed their lives. This includes the ‘snowball effect’ of positive feedback from coaches and therapists who have also successfully used the process with their clients.
The principle of Rescripting is around identity which I explain in the video below – how do we define ourselves?
There are numerous ways of defining identity:
Freud’s Id – our natural and unique essence, and genetic and cultural disposition.
Our roles in life – professional, personal, but also our creative and restorative roles.
Gender, racial, social, political, national, and regional identity
And lastly, and perhaps more accurately, our metaphoric identity – the role we unconsciously learnt to play in the theatre of life, or, Transactional Analysis terms, our Life-Script.
These ideas are common in literature for a reason. For instance, the Atlas script, is the idea that we can rely on no one and must hold all the burdens of life, not just for ourselves, but for everyone else. There are of course many such stories with different identity types.
Transactional Analysis summaries them as: Be Strong; Be Perfect; Be Different; Please People and Hurry Up.
The Rescripting identity coaching process I cover allows people to consider who they want to be and uses many tools and principles from NLP (and TA) to make this most delicate of journeys successful. Our past selves are never destroyed, they are always within us – sadly, the ‘Id’ part of us is so worried about destroying ourselves that it can sabotage successful change simply as an archaic way of trying to preserve ourselves.
Change of identity can go along with an irrational, but profound fear of personal destruction. I have found a way to make this part of the journey, seamless so the change is comfortable and lasting.
Did you like this post?
Then check out our events and courses, if you’d like to learn Rescripting directly from Robbie then look for our Advanced Coaching course.
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